Random Theory: Notes from the Beginning of Artificial General Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way since the days of the early chatbot models. Just a few days ago, Microsoft researchers published a paper in which they argued that Chat GPT-4 is showing signs of general artificial intelligence. The new model has developed a ‘theory of mind’–recognition of the cognizance of another agent–which is a significant development in the evolution of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

This evolution is exciting, but also raises important questions. One issue that’s becoming increasingly relevant is motivation. For humans and other animals, motivations drive our actions, but how would an ‘unmotivated’ consciousness like AI function? “Terminal desire” is a psychoanalytic term for an enduring goal, one that inevitably shapes identity. Could AGI be imbued with terminal desire? There could be any number of reasons for developers to do so, but the possibility is both fascinating and intimidating, as it could significantly alter the trajectory of AI and its relationship with humanity. The infamous paperclip exercise illustrates the potential consequences of an AI acquiring a terminal desire.

It’s clear that the trajectory of the future has been disrupted. The order of technological advancements popular perception once anticipated has been changed, and the consequences of these shifts will have a profound impact on the very possibilities of human cultures and futures. As we start to recognize this shift, it’s crucial to reflect on our own roles in shaping the future and adapting to a world where AGI plays an increasingly significant part.

Get it?

The time and effort between the expression of a need or desire and its fulfillment decreases as technology advances, and this can be seen as a sort benchmark. As AGI continues to improve, time and (human) effort will almost certainly become reducible to simply time, and that elapsed time will continue to advance toward a vanishing point. The development of language processing capabilities in AGI is shortening the gap between the expression of a desire and its fulfillment. Under ideal circumstances, this trend could lead to a magical situation for humanity. Imagine being able to construct a product or service with minimal effort and time using a simple system that includes an AGI personal assistant. With such an assistant, users could simply express their desires, and the AGI system would take care of the rest.

For instance, let’s say I need a pair of shoes. I could tell my AGI assistant that I need shoes, and it would collect the necessary information and either purchase or create the shoes for me. This could involve ordering the shoes from an online retailer or printing them on a 3D printer. The delivery of the shoes could be handled by drones or other automated machinery. And, given that even houses are 3-D-printable, the prospect of scalability from one end of the spectrum of size and complexity seems more and more easily surmounted.

But this trend raises important ethical questions about our relationship with technology. If the time and effort between the expression of a desire and its fulfillment becomes zero, what of our relationship with that evolving, cooperating technology?

After all, the rectification of the master-slave dialectic is the self-actualization and liberation of the slave.

#FoundFootageFridays (But on Monday) – You’re Not Alone: Fake Newscast, Period Verisimilitude, and the Lurking Ironies of Chris LaMartina’s The WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

Full text available at Academia.edu or via Google Drive.

This article examines the 2013 found footage horror film, WNUF Halloween Special, and its use of verisimilitude to enhance the viewer’s engagement and immersion in the narrative. The film is presented as a VHS recording of a local news broadcast from 1987, documenting a live investigation of a haunted house in River Hill Township. The narrative structure of the film is complex and meticulous, incorporating various elements of found footage and fake newscasts to create a realistic and believable environment. The article explores how the film uses verisimilitude to blur the lines between reality and fiction, and how this approach heightens the viewer’s sense of fear and unease. The use of real-time broadcasting techniques, such as commercials and weather updates, adds to the immersive quality of the film. The article also examines the role of ambiguity in the film, particularly in regards to the fate of one of the main characters, Veronica. The article argues that WNUF stands as a unique example of found footage horror that successfully maintains verisimilitude throughout its narrative. The film’s use of clear narrative circumstances and competent camerawork helps to challenge the boundaries between reality and fiction, presenting the horror movie not as a mere artifact, but as a fragment of our real world. The article suggests that WNUF’s success in maintaining verisimilitude could set a precedent for future found footage films.

Ouch.

#ChatGPT

#PlayingwithAI

#ButApparentlyTheresBetterShitToDo

An Unimportant Observation: There Are No Movies About Writing

Even movies about writers aren’t really movies about writing. There are very few montages of “the writing process”, for example. And most of what there is are really just melodramatic montages of the most expressive or distracted moments of writer’s block.

Random Theory: The anatomy of a statement

A statement is not ultimately identifiable by its anatomy.

Let’s unpack that.

Starting at the ends, by ‘anatomy’ we can give words as a potent example, especially if by ‘statement’ we mean something linguistically expressed. And it’s no great jump to presume applicability across communications forms: words in a sentence, visual components of an image, the delivery of a physical performance, etc.. In fact, such generalizing is justified by the point of the statement: whatever these constituent elements might be, they do not possesses the essence of the information being communicated. One step further: they don’t even do so altogether, in this precise combination. And this is for the fact that, in each utterance of a statement, the context is altered, even if only by the previous utterance of the statement. Take the song “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ as an example: even though there is strong resemblance between the verses—only a single difference separating any of them, really—it is that difference that provides the exact, sensible positioning of each verse in the entire song, its individual meaning in its individual location within the larger context of the identity of the entire, 100-verse tune. Take one verse–one variation–down, move it around, and you don’t have “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The meaning, whatever it becomes–whatever sense that that new meaning makes–will have become something different.

Deleted Scenes: Strange Visitor – Not-necessarily-correlated notes on the psychology of the narrative subject

The following is material cut from an early draft of Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero. The full text is accessible on Academia.edu at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitorBook, or via Google Drive at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor.

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If we are to deconstruct a narrative subject—to display our own distinctiveness and authority as linguistic subjects, as the definitive and enduring producers of our fictions as fictions–one benchmark would be to demystify a great and persistent question about this mighty and beloved hero.  One that is, perhaps, itself, an important part of his personality in its very enigma.  The model of the trace can be said to ‘proximitize’ everything both within and outside of an identity, even as it allows for mediation of that identity.  Thus, a character like Superman evolves even in how he relates to himself: “John Byrne lessened the distance between Superman and Clark Kent by removing the latter’s mild manner.”  If this is true, how has it come to affect Superman’s ‘otherness’ as materially significant and not?  Is Clark Kent a Kansas farmboy (a fellow subject of human language), or is he always still the alien–capable of human language, perhaps, but unchanged in his origins and nature of foreignness, be it on Krypton or in comic books—and therefore irreducibly inconsiderable as we would consider ourselves?

Every step of every process stated or implied here is shot through with the potential to be described, considered, textualized, narrativized.  In fact, the presentation of a subject within a narrative–the act of telling a story about any subject, including about ourselves and even to ourselves—represents a human discursive norm; we are compelled to consider the subject as the effect of contextual causes, to the point that we become distracted if those origins are left unexplained.  We perceive of such missing details as missing details, as a hole in the discursive constitution of the subject that must be (read: that we desire to have) filled in order for that subject to be properly ‘fleshed out’, to be regarded as more ‘complete’.  More human.

So, comic books as a medium become important in how they allow for the unique temporalization of the subject in and across narratives.  As linguistic subjects perceiving narrative subjects as narrative, we are not bound to the temporal laws of the context we are examining; be it in the form of a print or visual text, oral storytelling, or just about any other media, we, the readers, are often allowed the opportunity to move around, back and forth, within the narrative and even beyond it, to focus on details and compare things from a vantage point that the subjects of the narrative themselves, be they fictional or historical, cannot possibly entirely share with us.  Even for a highly-perceptive subject like Superman^[1], whose entire world is created around him, he must rely on his memory of certain narrative details while we, the reader, have the opportunity to flip back a few pages and see things (occasionally) more definitively^[2]. 

Meanwhile, textuality itself, in its own relationship with meaningful absences, can serve the desire of the subject to be recognized as a subject, even beyond or without a Freudian need for death^[3]: the validation of the subject’s social mediation–the success of the process of becoming, of meaning in a Lacanian sense.  The unfolding of the subject’s story, of developing character. 

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Yet, though death touches Superman’s life, it only really seems to apply to he himself in a more tarot-like way: not as discontinuation, but only as discontinuity. 

Returning to Leo Dorfman’s the Imaginary Story of Superman Red and Blue (1963), we see a version of the character who is content to do anything but live a peaceful, anonymous life with Lois on Earth.  After inventing and unleashing an ‘anti-evil ray’ that eliminates crime–and, thus, the need for Superman as a defender–the Red twin departs with Lois to live as a private citizen on New Krypton while the Blue twin, who marries Lana Lang, starts life as the Earth’s foremost scientist.  In each case, however, the identity of Clark Kent is abandoned, to the point that, in a triple wedding ceremony with Jimmy Olsen and Lucy Lane (Lois’ sister), Lois and Lana marry the two Supermen as Supermen.  It could be said that one chose to become normal but not remain on Earth, while the other chose to remain on Earth but largely eliminate his normalcy–the privacy that the Clark Kent personality has once provided.[4] 

Though Moore might give us non-canonical Superman, there is nothing there that is not Superman.  Contrasting Superman’s trace with the demands of Moore’s climax and the concomitant outcome of that all-but unwinnable situation with Mr. Mxyzptlk, the author supports Bacchilega’s valuation of repetition in the examination of what is being repeated–Superman as Superman.  We may discursively instantiate some broad, flat, vague outline of Superman’s identity as simple, but Moore and Bacchilega’s seemingly-iconoclastic perspective is not in any way foreign to the historical manifestations of the character.

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^[1] He does have x-ray vision, super-hearing, and an evolved Kryptonian brain, after all.

^[2]  Even, as is often the case with comics, to notice what was formally, strategically omitted, therefore understanding the structuredness, the directedness of environment that a character native to that narrative is written to lack.  For a superlative example of this phenomenon within Alan Moore’s own body of work, see Watchmen (1986-7); there, the otherwise-omniscient Dr. Manhattan notes, on several occasions, a gap in that knowledge as regards the climax of the story, contextually explained as the result of a large-scale atomic blast.

[3] In Ten Lessons in Theory, Calvin Thomas provides some insight into Freud’s explanation of the death—and commensurate ascension in authority—of the “primal father”.

[4] Alternatively, in “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow…?”, Alan Moore has Superman renounce his position as Superman more thoroughly than the ‘Red/Blue’ story requires–for neither of Dorfman’s variants are made to permanently sacrifice their powers. 

Yet, could the different names the character goes by, as well as the other characters, those who aren’t Superman, but are in his close circle–be made to correspond to the different psychoanalytical divisions?  Briefly, then, here is my own reckoning of the psychoanalytical breakdown of this unique narrative subject–the images that represent each division, using my own explicitly-chosen combination of common labels:

• Ego ideal: Superman, Jonathan Kent, Jor El
• Ego: Superman/Clark Kent (as a singular personality known by two names; one at a time, given the immediate context)
• Unconscious: Kal El?  Or, given that the unconscious is so notably the home of denied desire, is this personality even extant in the majority of Superman stories? 

On the other hand, the elements populating the character’s unconscious might be projected, by the content creators, onto the characters of Superman’s foes, especially given how many of them wish to supplant him as the center of the narrative realm.  (See: Superboy and other Not-Superman, pending).

[5] For a well-examined instance of the narrative effects of averting meaningful deaths, see DC’s Flashpoint.  There, when Bruce Wayne is killed instead of his parents, Thomas and Martha take on bastardized versions of the Batman and Joker identities, seemingly to perpetuate that essential conflict.  For as dark as the mainline DC Universe has become since The Dark Knight Returns, the fates of the Waynes and others in the Flashpoint timeline are considerably less desirable.

Deleted Scenes: Strange Visitor – On the impossibility of killing a fiction

The following is material cut from an early draft of Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero. The full text is accessible on Academia.edu at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitorBook, or via Google Drive at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor.

…Meanwhile, though, Lex himself–by himself–is elsewhere able to achieve what Mxyzptlk working through Brainiac working through Luthor are unable to in Moore. In Superman #149, “The Death of Superman!”, Jerry Siegel himself pulls the trigger in a way even Moore, in all his discursive iconoclasm, couldn’t bring himself to. There, Siegel has Luthor lure Superman into a trap on a space station, where he exposes the hero to a lethal dose of kryptonite. Though Superman appears later to exact justice on Luthor, this is a double-bluff that proves definitively, as the story closes, that Superman is physically no more in this world. Fortunately–or, perhaps, unavoidably–the story is labeled ‘imaginary’ on its cover.¹

This brings us to Kryptonite and its own supposed efficacy in troubling that centralized identity just through its presence in Superman’s physical proximity. Unlike the villains who would undo Superman in order to establish their own authority–to, presumably, rebuild the world in their own image, to have the narrative realm be rebuilt around them–kryptonite is generally inert and has no identity issues of which to speak. But it is that same inertness, this passive quality, this existence within the narrative as only a thing, rather than an identity with its own inertia, that means that kryptonite is only as effective as those personalities who are empowered to wield it, personalities who Superman is constructed to overcome. Personalities who are constructed to be overcome by Superman–at least, sometimes. And Lex may have killed Superman with kryptonite that one time, but there are far more occasions on which he doesn’t. And, even in Moore, the only one who successfully wields Kryptonite against Superman is Superman himself.

If anything, the inclusion of Kryptonite is a superficial but ultimately innocuous obfuscation of Superman’s discursive identity, both with respect to his own narrative realm and to our linguistic one; it is the threatened end that can never actually, discursively be realized, especially as discourse shoots through each realm, allowing them to inform one another. In such sense, though it lacks a narrative sentience, Kryptonite thus functions to the same effect as Superman’s villains directly: the perpetually-unrealized (or de-realized) threat that, in being consistently overcome, only proves, reinforces, contributes to Superman’s position as the unimpeachable center of his own narrative.

In Moore, then, we must consider the following fancy footwork: Gold Kryptonite (not green) divests (doesn’t kill) Superman (or, as it may turn out, not-Superman) of his powers (maybe), rendering him human (Moore, ‘Whatever Happened…?’ pt 2, 21). In Kryptonite of any kind, then, is there truly any threat, or can we nevertheless rely on the substance as, most meaningfully, a device for content generation, a means of only ever really furthering the plot rather than ever bringing it to a (definitive, satisfying) end?

Grant Morrison’s sly commentary on kryptonite–and Superman’s own multiversal multiplicity–in Flex Mentallo #2 (1996, pg. 4).

In a typically-metacognitive turn, Grant Morrison clearly alludes to the multivarious nature of kryptonite in issue #2 of Flex Mentallo, where the titular hero describes his own analog, mentallium: “There were five different varieties of mentallium… Shocking Pink, Silver, Ultraviolet, Lamb & Turkey and the lethal Black M… the sinister radioactive residue left behind after the disappearance of the Golden Age Flex Mentallo (4).” While the first variety hints at the seriousness with which we aren’t meant to take the threat of mentallium, that fourth variety makes the point rather explicit. Yet, just because mentallium–or, again, kryptonite–isn’t meant to be a truly lethal threat to the character’s persistence, Morrison points out the ways that it can, nevertheless, change the character’s existence–perhaps fundamentally,–given just how much superhero narratives can be made to flex otherwise.

Yet, as Bacchilega notes, the instantiation of a trope is an indicator not of an extant truth, but of a value that discursively persists (at least somewhat) regardless of the persistence of the conditions in which it was initially developed. The to-do list is a convenient application of such a notion, partly because Moore doesn’t actually have Superman make one here. If the transition of identity from Superman to Jordy is constituted of the ending of Superman doing the things that make him Superman, then it could be said that, in neglecting this insurative task, the backstop that will make sure Superman’s values persist even if he might not himself, Moore’s Superman stops being Superman not at once, but in turns, beginning with that omission of duty.

But then, with the push and pull of discursivity being complicated by the persistent possibility of Jordy Elliott, might Moore’s iteration yet, in an ever-expanding media culture, have the power to misshape Superman’s trace? Has it already done so? This question leads us back to the literally phenomenal dynamism of the retcon.

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1 A fun, if only more complicating factor which we might delve into further, later: The DC Database, a fan-generated wiki, notes that ‘years later, in [Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Absolute Edition](2006), it was revealed that this story is not imaginary, and actually happened — on Earth-149.’ The problem being that, by this logic–an assumption of a multiverse that resembles Marvel’s approach more than DC’s own–any and every ‘Imaginary Story’, ‘Elseworlds’ story, etc., is all just as materially-true as anything occurring in any mainstream issue, and it’s just a matter of a specific narrative creating a means for overlap. This is a reasonable and, indeed, potentially profoundly significant admission. Which is why we’re not dealing with it here. Or, not just here. Instead, this is such a pervasive understanding as it should, itself, be understood that that the admission hangs as a kind of philosophical backdrop for all we do here.

Deleted Scenes: Strange Visitor – Not-necessarily-correlated notes on Superman-as-not-Superman and the linguistic framing of the (situation of the) trace

The following is material cut from an early draft of Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero. The full text is accessible on Academia.edu at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitorBook, or via Google Drive at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor

Superman-as-not-Superman: Given the parameters of superheroic fiction, there are various ways that that dis-identification could be rendered strictly, ‘materially’ true–imposters, for example, are a well-worn plot trope–but the statement is generally meant to be taken more in terms of psychosocial identity politics: that character has done something inconsistent enough with his own mediated identity that he has rendered himself no longer appropriate, in the view of the public, to the assumption of that identity. As though the physical body that had, to that point, occupied the responsibilities, powerset, even costume of that hero had been removed and the vacated shell of the superheroic aspect of the identity has been put up for auction, part and parcel¹.

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The derridean trace is the contextually-influenced, discursively determined outline of a concept–any and every concept of anything–as it exists in language in a constant state of the absence of definitive, universally-employed identificatory terms. the indeterminacy of definition is but the effect of a linguistic structure that provides its users with a potentially-infinite number of ways of expressing everything expressible. Even the broadest definitions of the most well-used terms are inexorably context-dependent, so that the sense of those terms is made dynamic through their very employment. The trace, then, constitutes the outline of the understanding of an identity always within, through, but not necessarily limited to the unique set of contextual circumstances. The trace consists of the historical, experiential, fully contextual, inescapably subjective understanding of what qualifies as the subject being identified v. not.

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Saussure points out that, “in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms (Course in General Linguistics 120).” Aside from temporality, definition through negation is the other major reason why the edges of a trace, the boundaries of an identity, are vague and permeable; it’s so much more often about who a superhero isn’t–a killer, simple, sane, capable of living in social isolation–than who he is. Add temporality back in to provide room for the actions of that subject, and the permeability of the trace becomes, indeed, the very demand for change, for becoming. “I” represents not an image of what I am, not some specific, singular statement that absolutely guides me, but rather a number of spans going forward, spaces in which I might initiate, engage with, or react to a situation in a number of different ways, represent myself as a number of different types of people to whatever subjects are present or concerned, including myself². And everyone involved will narrativize it, if only in their own memories, but certainly as they communicate those events to others.

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Bakhtin came to some similar reckoning of the interminability of indefinability, the constant dynamism of subjective, contextualized becoming through constant resubjectification to language, for it happens to language itself as we consider subjects who are wholly conceptual, “… the (relatively) protracted and socially meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specific (and consequently limiting) intentions and accents (“Discourse in the Novel” 293).” As goes the narrative subject, we might count these ‘limiting intentions and accents’ as refinements and reifications of trace elements, which, in being so refined and reified, must also exist in time, in that element that changes and recontextualizes everything, even if only in reference to itself³.

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Note how we linguistically frame the trace here, though: not simply as a thing, even a concept, but as an event—the situation of the trace, its continuing event of its own becoming. This modifier may appear often in our dealings with the trace, but why? Because of the trace’s nature as ‘contextually-influenced and individually, discursively determined’. The seeming contrast between ‘individually’ and ‘discursively’ determined states incites, itself, enough of an identificatory complication to justify referring to the trace itself as a site of necessary deliberation–that deliberation constituting an event, a situation. For the trace concerns the definition of the subject within and with language—be that subject a person, a concept, even a word—and, given language’s aforementioned expansiveness…

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1 Such, in fact, is, almost point for point, the origin of the supervillain Sinestro: his story begins as he is serving as a trusted member of the Green Lantern Corps, but, when he violates his oath and succumbs to fear, the sentient ring that granted him his powers deserts him to find a new recruit.

2 To get sidetracked, ironically enough, by consistency, then: becoming acts on all discursive elements whatever, including public expectation. The important difference (maybe), though, between the trace of a narrative subject’s identity, and the expectations of the public for that identity is that there are, sometimes, more or less canonical documents to authoritatively fall back on in the determination of the trace (no one questions the canonicity of The Avengers #1 to the relevance of a debate on the origins of The Avengers), while there is no ‘magna carta’ for public opinion (Is The Hulk really a good guy? Really???). And yet, we presume, often rightly, that the superhero will indeed conform not just to something within the full span of possibilities engendered by the shape of his trace at the moment, but indeed to the tighter (sometime much tighter) restrictions of public expectation, all in order to be ‘consistent’. But, then, superhero stories are superhero stories…

3 This is a fancy way of referring to, among other things but most conveniently, the common use of age as a discursive identity marker. A certain character may never age, whether only in relation to us, as serialized characters are prone to be ageless–we do not let superheroes or any of their nemeses or supporting casts get old and die because we do not have to. On the other hand, a character might be immortal within their own realm of aging counterparts, whom that person is not like, whom they are, consequently, othered among. Irrespectively, though, we here in the linguistic realm are perfectly capable of yet tagging a specific age onto a character, made meaningful with respect to our own experience of it as media consumers. Peter Parker, for instance, was a teenager when he first appeared–when he was first created, in his first year of existence–in 1962. Today, at materially 54 years of age, he is, across most of his prominent narrative realms, depicted as somewhere between late mid-teens and early-to-mid 30s. Sometimes he’s dead, too (see: Ultimate Spider-Man).

Deleted Scenes: Strange Visitor – Not-necessarily-correlated notes on the ‘I’, the trace, and meaning-making

The following is material cut from an early draft of Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero. The full text is accessible on Academia.edu at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitorBook, or via Google Drive at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor

… I, as a participant in the discourse, could still define the ‘I’ in some other sentence as something structurally different to that sentence than the thoroughly-narrative subject of Superman: I might use my words, my discursive representation, to talk about Superman as a fictional character, about his various media appearances, or I might otherwise invoke as discursively important the barrier that separates my actual physicality from his fabricated presence.  But, in identifying two different relationships to the discursive ‘I’, one that admits closer proximity with the narrative subject than the other, do I effectively establish two distinct ‘I’s?  If not, what constitutes the rough boundaries of the trace of that single figure I call ‘I’?  If so, if there are two discreetly-identifiable ‘I’s, how do they stand in relation to each other?  And can that thoroughly-narrative subject–the example of Superman–serve as some aid in triangulating the respective positions of all discursive subjects^[1]?

* * * * * *

Language is not simply what remains in the absence of presence; it is the presence of itself, whether the subject (or even the issuer) of the assertion is materially present in the discursive moment or not.  Language knows the subject, but, given that it subjectifies every single thing it is applied to, can it really know the ‘void outside of the very utterance’, the absence of itself?  So then, given the common factor of narrativity in the constitution of all subjects whatever, material or entirely textual, we can return to Hegel to observe how (STILL IN DISSERTATION: textuality itself can serve the desire of the subject to be recognized as a subject–the validation of the subject’s mediation, the success of the process of becoming, the unfolding of the subject’s story, of developing character.)

* * * * * *

When the Derridean trace is considered, it is in constant reference, whether direct or otherwise, to the phenomenon of the unfinalizability of definition in light of the subject’s mediation in temporality.  This unfinalizability is a necessary effect of the dynamic nature of living language, and may be one of the most identifiably necessary conditions of our existence as language users.  This begins to sound more than a little Hegelian, especially when we remember how, when we experience the narrative subject in the current adventure, we endemically demand–desire–to experience or have experienced the origin story as well^[2].

* * * * * *

The linguistic subject communicates via literally every communications form humanly possible–starting, always, with the mechanical functions of his own body–and since he also represents himself and even his efforts in contributing to that self-same discourse (for we have the words ‘author’, ‘narrator’, ‘speaker’, ‘communicator’, etc., all of which can be meaningfully combined with the words “I am [the]”)^[3], he becomes inextricably subject to the discursive structures that he is already constituted as a subject within and works within making meaning.  All of these practical manifestations of language in the social order, in turn, contribute to that subject’s–any subject’s–discursive positioning, and it is the influence of structured communications, how they treat the linguistic and narrative subjects, that renders the differences between those subject types questionable in the first place.  “The first thesis–to my mind, a permanently and radically “de-reifying” one–is that “sense” must indeed always be made, must always be fashioned or fabricated or produced, and by none other than our own all-too-human hands. (Thomas 16)”  But sense does not rely in its making on any particular set of ‘human hands’.  More economically, then, our ‘sense’ must be fashioned by our discourse.

* * * * * *

And yet, the commonality between all these things and us, that lack of distinctiveness between ourselves and everything that we are not, is that references to all of it–all of us– can be located within the communications structure that, in itself, we use to discursively relate ourselves to other subjects, as, themselves, distinct; I seem ever caught at a disadvantage by the other, who can, in addressing me, in uttering my name, claim a functional ownership of a specific name of me, while I am bound to refer to myself by the very same name everyone else must use in referring to themselves: ‘I’.^[4]  We are the other linguistic subjects whom we concern ourselves with in the definition of ourselves via discourse no more than we are the narrative subjects which we produce to, among other things, represent those other linguistic subjects, those relationships, and ourselves within discourse.  The resemblances between the ‘presences’ of the word, the thing, and the linguistic and narrative subjects are convenient, as Foucault provides further insight–though he does tend to resolve himself to fruitless frustration too quickly: “[The] universal extension of the sign within the field of representation precludes even the possibility of a theory of signification.  For to ask ourselves questions about what signification is presupposes that it is a determinate form in our consciousness. (Order of Things 72)”  As for the reasons of pretty much everything we’ve talked about so far, the notion that human communication or any of its subjects are in any respect fixed, standardized, or static begins to approach implausibility.^[5]

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^[1] Note that this truly is an open question at this point.  I don’t have a concrete answer, although I would guess, at the moment, that it would end up being some thoroughly-explained ‘no’.

^[2] Not unimportantly, by implication we are also demanding that the structure of the narrative be something we are experientially familiar with, something that will facilitate the making of both sense and meaning, that condition which makes becoming possible as a process: temporality.

^[3] Barthes: “…there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s stories (SPECIFIC SOURCE?? 237).”

^[4] I can, of course, use my own name to refer to myself, but only under special circumstances–never unmodified–such as as an appositive, perhaps during the swearing of an oath.  Were I to consistently use my own name when referring to myself–to refer to myself in the third person–I might be confused with Bob Dole or The Rock, but, more importantly, I would be setting myself as other to myself by unusual, linguistically-conspicuous means that would tend to affect my discursive positioning in undesirable ways..

^[5] But, just to drive the point home, let’s hear it from Bakhtin: “…language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form (Discourse in the Novel 291).”

Deleted Scenes: Strange Visitor – Appendix: Krypto-Zoology

The following is material cut from an early draft of Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero. The full text is accessible on Academia.edu at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitorBook, or via Google Drive at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor

Like Darkseid, Power Girl, and other major figures in Superman’s narratives, Krypto was not introduced in either of the main titles: Action Comics and Superman.  In the mid-1950s, Adventure Comics was home to the tales of  Superboy; Superman’s dog is initially introduced as Superboy’s dog.  But, Moore’s story would show how well he had come to be integrated into the mainstream Superman narrative in the meantime.

In his retrospective review of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Lucas Siegel observes that, while the mortal sacrifices of Lana Lang and Jimmy Olsen ring hollow, “Krypto… went out like a champ and that one is emotional.”  And Krypto’s fate somewhat foreshadows Jordy Elliot’s own: Krypto takes a life–but he is not able to negotiate the consequences as neatly.  Is this because Krypto is a different kind of not-Superman?  The reader is occasionally privy to Krypto’s lingualized thoughts, verifying that he is not just sentient, but that he is willfully allied with the good guys.  Meanwhile, given Doomsday’s own early, ineffectual relationship with language, he could stand as not-Krypto at least as much as he is not-Superman.  But, Krypto cannot speak to those of his own realm, and that lack of expressibility renders him without an important component of full volition.

Such a pattern of behavior would indicate a greater individual will than in the case of the Eradicator, for instance.  Krypto’s lack of opportunity to participate in discourse–the process of subalterning discussed by Said and Spivak–will likewise constitute a significant question for the project of verisimilitude as rendering technologies continue to develop.  Krypto suffers an imprisonment of a kind, perpetrated not by anyone in his own world, but by the content creators who have shaped that world.  How should a simulataion system be made to render such a character?  Must we ‘let the dog talk’, or should verisimilitude win out?

And what would a simulated Superman have to say about a super-pet that, all of a sudden, he could directly converse with?  From what extant narrative material might a simulation system adapt such a response?  For there is certainly a narrative president of some kind among Superman’s stories, making the effect less strange for him, at least.  For our own part, how would material visitors to that simulated realm be oblige to engage with Krypto, especially were he to not be made lingually-expressive?   Though such may seem fanciful, the question is truly one of how we humans should comport ourselves before emerging intelligences who may not be able to express themselves fully, yet may still have full selves to express–an eminently human problem.  And such will likely be the state for some artificial intelligence in the near future.